March 29 - Shower

It's October 2008. You're in a small sports bar next to a Best Western in a town in West Virginia whose name you genuinely do not remember. You drove half of the day and say in the passenger seat for the other half while your wife drove. You're going from North Carolina to Ohio to visit a good friend who performed your wedding ceremony and used to be a pro wrestler. Your mind is in a hundred tired places for a hundred tired reasons. Earlier today, while sitting in a passenger seat as the Ford truck you were in headed through the mountains you read a horror comic that traumatised you in such an intense way that seventeen and a half years later you will still from time to time think about it although you obviously don't know this at the time.

You're eating probably a steak and you just had probably some French Onion Soup and you're thinking about all sorts of things including the looming financial crisis that will take your job in a year and a half although you don't know that yet, and the election next month, and the novel you're going to write in November, and from the other room you hear a guitarist start playing on stage. A song about the world falling apart and financial ruin and good champagne. You are too tired to really concentrate, but that's the song and the moment.

That didn't happen, by the way. The town was real and the comic and the crisis and the election and the novel and the job, but we ate at an Outback, and went on to have a perfectly pleasant little trip. Nobody sang a song in the bar that night. But that's where my mind goes. There's always chaos to be on the brink of.